BY PHILLIP OCHIENG
A political party should be distinguishable from all others through (a) a specific long-term ideological line and (b) a set of rules of conduct by which leading members must live their public lives. Moreover, on both these strategic and tactical guidelines, the party’s paramount chief must be recognised as its general guardian.
Therefore, Raila Odinga is breaking no fundamental tenet of democracy by asking leading members of his Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) to abide by its policies – both long-term and short – or get out of the party. If you disagree with any of the party’s policies, said he the other day, you have only two choices.
Either you seek a special intra-party discussion of your disagreement or you quit altogether. For you cannot have your cake and eat it, too. You cannot maintain any fundamental personal disagreement and seek to force it without any discussion and yet remain a member of the party’s hierarchy of national officials.
But the point is (a) the party is not Mr Odinga’s personal property and (b) it belongs to the human world, in which, therefore, conditions and needs are always changing. In a democratic situation, any such socio-environmental transformation can constrain any member to propose a radical revision of the party’s laid-down policies.
In that case, the postulates of political decency should force the leadership to listen keenly to and, if convinced, to act upon his or her proposal. If that is the case, then, why should Mr Odinga appear so discomfited by the challenge to his ODM leadership by Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero and other relative youngsters?
The answer, I think, is that such a development is new to Mr Odinga as a person. Ever since his father, Jaramogi Odinga, handed to him the political leadership of the Luo on a silver-platter, the younger Odinga has been the unchallenged Luo leader. You either obey him or your days are numbered as a national ODM player.
That is what raises such a plethora of questions as to whether, for the Luo community and for any party in which they have invested any energy and other resources, there has existed anything like democracy ever since the assassination of Tom Mboya in the context of another form of rivalry – the national inter-tribal one.
As has been pointed out time and again, without specific approval from the older Odinga or the younger, your hopes of rising to the national platform, whether political or otherwise, has always been virtually nil. For obvious reasons, this has erected a solid wall against all intellectual independence, all personal initiative and, on the level of practice, all creativity in political work.
Where all the bloodstreams of thought have been blocked and no youthful oxygen can reach the nerve centre at the party headquarters, the party is gasping for air because it is moribund. As with the Germans once upon a time, even the most educated Luo has been reduced to performing rituals of praise to Der Fuehrer.
How can the chief himself receive any refreshing new thoughts? Even, inter-ethnically – since the ODM is generally supported by the Abaluhya of Western Province and the Mijikenda of the Indian Ocean littoral – there is no longer any benefit from what the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “one work that wakes”.
The time has come for the Luo to stop investing all their vital political resources in only one individual or family because that habit is essentially incestuous and, as everybody knows, incest cannot allow the organism to receive that variety of genetic inputs which is necessary for all specific survival and production of plenty.
No, even from Mr Kidero, I have not seen any radically new thought – strategic or tactical – with which to reinvigorate the ODM. But I support every challenge to the party’s present leadership because, only through such challenge, can it eventually latch onto enlightened leaders who can romp into State House and help lead Kenya out of its present doldrums.
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